Turning Customers Into Salespeople
Inc
How companies like Roku boost sales with referral marketing
Roku was one of the first companies to bring online movies to people's living rooms. Three years ago, the Saratoga, California-based company started selling remote-controlled devices that can stream online media content, such as Netflix movies and Pandora radio, to TV sets. When competitors began to emerge, they were formidable: Microsoft, Apple, Google. Unlike those giants, Roku, which has about 100 employees, didn't have deep pockets for advertising campaigns.

What Roku did have was fans. Through surveys, the company had learned that about a quarter of its one million customers were so smitten with their Roku players that they had encouraged friends to buy one. "We knew we had an engaged customer base that was passionate about the product, and we wanted to tap into that," says Lomit Patel, Roku's senior director of direct marketing.

Last year, Roku launched a refer-a-friend marketing campaign, which rewards customers for recommending the company's video players to people they know.


Change Gauge: 20 Key Marketing Moves
AdAge
When a CEO hires a chief marketer, he or she is not looking for someone to simply manage the marketing department. The CEO needs a "seat-at-the-table" business partner who can be a thought leader for the corporation, providing a broad-based commercial perspective on the business, as opposed to a more narrowly focused brand-building approach.

Look at Research in Motion's hire of Roger Baxter, now VP-brand marketing communications. As the former chief strategy officer at Publicis, Mr. Baxter's ability to think big will be put to use as RIM looks to revamp its aging BlackBerry products.

It is also still the CMOs job to manage brand equity and be the keeper of the corporate reputation. More than ever before, CMOs are expected to be the brand ambassador as well as brand custodian. This becomes more and more challenging as CMOs give up some control of brand messaging in the new world of consumer-centric digital and social media. Growth in the top and bottom line must be achieved through marketing tactics that have been redefined with the explosion of grassroots digital and social-media options. Some companies, like Procter & Gamble, are recognizing this with the creation of specialized roles: The packaged-goods giant recently named Ilonka Laviz, former associate marketing director on its Always brand, to the role of marketing director-digital brand-building strategy, global e-commerce.


Am I Wasting My Time On Social Media?
Forbes
Whenever I bring up using social media to business people I always hear the same three questions:

1. Who has the time to do this?
2. How do I know if this is even worthwhile?
3. Oh God…did my kid really write that?

Social media must be big business. Why else would Google jump into it?

A new report says that 46 million Americans check social media sites at least twice a day! 46 million! And everywhere I turn I seem to hear how businesses are embracing social media. Example: a recent Webs.com survey says that 69% of small businesses “use” social media tools. Wow! And another survey says that 22% of small businesses use Facebook ads. Geez.


Why Silicon Valley Can’t Sell
AdWeek
Drive up and down the 101 Freeway in Silicon Valley, or cast your gaze north toward Seattle, and media companies, which expect to book over $20 billion in advertising in 2011, appear to be everywhere. But visit the biggest of these companies and ask them to define themselves, and you’ll be hard-pressed to get them to say they’re the new generation of media, attracting audiences for the purpose of selling advertising.

“We’re a core technology company,” says Nikesh Arora, Google’s chief business officer, whose team netted $10 billion in U.S. ad sales for the search giant last year.

“I don’t know [if we’re a media company], and to be honest, I’m not that interested in the answer,” says a slightly annoyed David Fischer, Facebook’s vice president of advertising, who sold $1.8 billion.

“Microsoft is first a technology company,” says Keith Lorizio, the head of sales for the software giant’s Advertising unit.
The exceptions? Yahoo and, on the East Coast, AOL—both once seen as tech leaders, but now laggards, trying to remake themselves as media companies. “I embrace it,” Ross Levinsohn, who joined Yahoo last November to run its Americas operations, says about the media label. “The media business is the most exciting business in the world.” But you won’t find any tech platform worth a few billion or more that admires Yahoo, AOL, or, for that matter, anybody else in the media business.


Pepsi Beverage Guru Unveils His Plan to Win Over the World
AdAge
It's at times been obscured, but the world view of PepsiCo's longtime beverage guru Massimo d'Amore is finally becoming clearer. Mr. d'Amore sits atop a beverage empire that's equal in distribution to that of rival Coca-Cola—both company's brands are sold in 200 markets internationally—but with a decidedly smaller global footprint: One in two soft drinks consumed around the world is marketed by Coke, while fewer than one in four is marketed by Pepsi.

Now, partly in recognition of the shrinking world created by digitization, PepsiCo is making a grab for a more global future, plotting its first worldwide campaign for its flagship brand for next year; juicing up its international push for Gatorade and putting to work an ambitious executive restructuring aimed at identifying long-range global insights and operating on them faster.

"There is real logic to this perceived madness," said Mr. d'Amore, CEO for PepsiCo Beverages Americas, acknowledging the breadth of changes at the company and at the $20 billion beverage division, in particular, over the past few years.

Mr. d'Amore, a charming Italian who has been a lightning rod for controversy for such efforts as the packaging redesigns of Pepsi and Tropicana by Peter Arnell, was candid over lunch at his Purchase, N.Y., office in describing the beverage division's journey, as well as why a global management structure is the right move.


Brand Jeter Hits One Out of the Park
Marketing Daily News
There was a huge hit in New York over the weekend and it wasn't on Broadway. It was in the Big Ball Orchard in the South Bronx (v. 2.0), as Art Rust Jr. used to call it. When Derek Jeter smacked his 3,000th career regular season hit (he also has a record 185 post-season hits), you could almost hear the ring of PayPal accounts miles north in Westchester.
In true Jeterian fashion, the ball landed in the seats -- only the third home run the Yankee captain has hit in 2011 and his first at Yankee Stadium in more than a year. The young man who caught it, 23-year-old Christian Lopez, decided to return it to Jeter with no strings attached, unleashing comment about his fine upbringing.

"Lopez showed the type of class that New Yorkers are sometimes capable of, and taught a lesson to young people everywhere, more than any lecture from a parent ever could," writes Paul LaRosa in his "Here Is New York" blog. "Selflessness is its own reward ..."

Estimates had been that the ball would bring upwards of a quarter million dollars in open bidding. You might be thinking that selflessness and a subway token will get you to Yankee Stadium from Times Square, but as the ever-perceptive LaRosa points out: "And by the way, as a customer service representative for Verizon, he also made his company look good!"


Bayer Ups MLB Sponsorship, Bats Away Pain
Media Post
Bayer has expanded a sponsorship arrangement with Major League Baseball to include a new product. The company will make ad buys on MLB telecasts linked with the new addition. The company's One A Day line of vitamins will remain the "Official Multivitamin of Major League Baseball," which has been in effect since 2008. But now, the new Bayer Advanced Aspirin will be the "Official Pain Reliever of Major League Baseball" as part of a multi-year deal.

Bayer said it would offer a baseball-linked promotion with the aspirin during the second half of the MLB season. Both brands will be part of a "FanFest" event next week in Phoenix, connected with the All-Star game.

One A Day has the MLB logo on packaging. Bayer is marketing its new aspirin line as being "twice as fast."

Barton Warner, marketing vice president at Bayer HealthCare, stated: "We look forward to rolling out many activities throughout the season."

MLB's official sponsors list is lengthy, stretching from Anheuser-Busch to Gatorade and GM to Nike and State Farm. The State Farm Home Run Derby, part of the All-Star festivities along with FanFest, will take place Monday on ESPN, while ESPN will also carry it in 3D for a second year in a row.